Tuesday, March 29, 2022

Size of the Orion Nebula

Considering that I was just looking at the constellation Orion as I brought in my trash cans from the road tonight, this is a good video to share now. I always look up at the stars, amazed by even the limited number of stellar lights that I can see in the night sky at my house. 

 Orion is one of the most obvious constellations, and was associated with Osiris & his resurrection in ancient Egypt. One interesting fact about this arrangement of stars is their spacial orientation, which is obviously not on a flat plane as it appears. This is a cool diagram showing their relationship in space, from the previous article:

 I love computer animated videos like the one below, because they give a perspective that is almost impossible to achieve strictly through verbal descriptions, or even numbers. Nothing can give you a quality existential crisis like a well-produced 3D animation like this, since it can clearly illustrate certain truths that reveal the mind-boggling nature of our reality.

This video was produced by Epic Spaceman & shows the scale of the nebula in the 'sword' of Orion, compared to our Sun. You just think about the incomprehensible vastness of space, and the mind & ego just "poof" away like an ephemeral cloud of dust.

The Orion Nebula vs The Sun: Scale of the Universe


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